The importance of having ef cient and effective methods for data mining and kn- ledge discovery (DM&KD), to which the present book is devoted, grows every day and numerous such methods have been developed in recent decades. There exists a great variety of different settings for the main problem studied by data mining and knowledge discovery, and it seems that a very popular one is formulated in terms of binary attributes. In this setting, states of nature of the application area under consideration are described by Boolean vectors de ned on some attributes. That is, by data points de ned in the Boolean space of the attributes. It is postulated that there exists a partition of this space into two classes, which should be inferred as patterns on the attributes when only several data points are known, the so-called positive and negative training examples. The main problem in DM&KD is de ned as nding rules for recognizing (cl- sifying) new data points of unknown class, i. e. , deciding which of them are positive and which are negative. In other words, to infer the binary value of one more attribute, called the goal or class attribute. To solve this problem, some methods have been suggested which construct a Boolean function separating the two given sets of positive and negative training data points.

This comprehensive textbook on data mining details the unique steps of the knowledge discovery process that prescribes the sequence in which data mining projects should be performed, from problem and data understanding through data preprocessing to deployment of the results. This knowledge discovery approach is what distinguishes Data Mining from other texts in this area. The book provides a suite of exercises and includes links to instructional presentations. Furthermore, it contains appendices of relevant mathematical material.

This book outlines the core theory and practice of data mining and knowledge discovery (DM & KD) examining theoretical foundations for various methods, and presenting an array of examples, many drawn from real-life applications. Most theoretical developments are accompanied by extensive empirical analysis, offering a deep insight into both theoretical and practical aspects of the subject. The book presents the combined research experiences of 40 expert contributors of world renown.

The growth in the amount of data collected and generated has exploded in recent times with the widespread automation of various day-to-day activities, advances in high-level scienti?c and engineering research and the development of e?cient data collection tools. This has given rise to the need for automa- callyanalyzingthedatainordertoextractknowledgefromit,therebymaking the data potentially more useful. Knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) is the process of identifying valid, novel, potentially useful and ultimately understandable patterns from massive data repositories. It is a multi-disciplinary topic, drawing from s- eral ?elds including expert systems, machine learning, intelligent databases, knowledge acquisition, case-based reasoning, pattern recognition and stat- tics. Many data mining systems have typically evolved around well-organized database systems (e.g., relational databases) containing relevant information. But, more and more, one ?nds relevant information hidden in unstructured text and in other complex forms. Mining in the domains of the world-wide web, bioinformatics, geoscienti?c data, and spatial and temporal applications comprise some illustrative examples in this regard. Discovery of knowledge, or potentially useful patterns, from such complex data often requires the - plication of advanced techniques that are better able to exploit the nature and representation of the data. Such advanced methods include, among o- ers, graph-based and tree-based approaches to relational learning, sequence mining, link-based classi?cation, Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, neural networks, kernel-based methods, evolutionary algorithms, rough sets and fuzzy logic, and hybrid systems. Many of these methods are developed in the following chapters.

Organizes major concepts, theories, methodologies, trends, challenges and applications of data mining (DM) and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). This book provides algorithmic descriptions of classic methods, and also suitable for professionals in fields such as computing applications, information systems management, and more.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD '99, held in Beijing, China, in April 1999. The 29 revised full papers presented together with 37 short papers were carefully selected from a total of 158 submissions. The book is divided into sections on emerging KDD technology; association rules; feature selection and generation; mining in semi-unstructured data; interestingness, surprisingness, and exceptions; rough sets, fuzzy logic, and neural networks; induction, classification, and clustering; visualization; causal models and graph-based methods; agent-based and distributed data mining; and advanced topics and new methodologies.

This book presents a specific and unified approach to Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, termed IFN for Information Fuzzy Network methodology. Data Mining (DM) is the science of modelling and generalizing common patterns from large sets of multi-type data. DM is a part of KDD, which is the overall process for Knowledge Discovery in Databases. The accessibility and abundance of information today makes this a topic of particular importance and need. The book has three main parts complemented by appendices as well as software and project data that are accessible from the book's web site (http://www.eng.tau.ac.iV-maimonlifn-kdg£). Part I (Chapters 1-4) starts with the topic of KDD and DM in general and makes reference to other works in the field, especially those related to the information theoretic approach. The remainder of the book presents our work, starting with the IFN theory and algorithms. Part II (Chapters 5-6) discusses the methodology of application and includes case studies. Then in Part III (Chapters 7-9) a comparative study is presented, concluding with some advanced methods and open problems. The IFN, being a generic methodology, applies to a variety of fields, such as manufacturing, finance, health care, medicine, insurance, and human resources. The appendices expand on the relevant theoretical background and present descriptions of sample projects (including detailed results).